Notes from the Textbook on Magazine

Notes from Textbook on Magazines

I did some research on magazines from pages 116-132 from Exploring the Media edited by Barbara Connell and published in 2008. It provided me with a good first insight into magazines, especially the construction and target audience of magazines.

I found out that magazines and newspaper arte in some ways similar yet a magazine can be split into many sub genres. When compared to newspapers they are a lot less factual and are not necessarily released weekly or even daily.  

The typical codes and conventions of a magazine include:  

A masthead - Tile of the magazine

Tag lines/strap lines - Captions to describe the magazine

Lure - for example a competition

Main image

Celebrity endorsement

Bar code

Date and price

etc.

These features show what genre a magazine is and it can change depending on the target audience.

What you can usually expect to see inside a magazine includes:

Editors letter

Contents page - like the front page the colour scheme, images, font and layout all depend on the genre/target audience

Advertisements

Double page spread - usually laid out in 2 or 3 columns with 1 large photo, normally related to the front cover.

Notable Publishers

2 most notable publishers are BBC Magazines and IPC.

BBC Magazines is an English company  usually producing synergies as the BBC is predominately a television institution. Their publications include:

Top of the Pops Magazine

Doctor Who Adventures

Top Gear

IPC is an American company, part of the biggest worldwide media conglomerate. Some of its most famous publications produced include:

NME

Sugar

Nuts

These global institutions often cater their publications to the stereotypes of which buy magazines for example boys are believed to buy car magazines and girls are thought to buy fashion magazine as this makes it easy to target a specific audiences. In addition to this, specialists magazines are targeted at a broad niche audience are also successful amongst specific audiences. These global companies were once thriving as the magazine industry was booming however; in recent years circulation figures for magazines have begun to decrease. This could perhaps be due to new technology as most magazines have apps and websites to keep their readers up-to-date causing them not to need to buy the physical copy.